Friday, 3 March 2017

The Ideas of March - Barry Lyga - A Short Story

Barry Lyga has a plan for what he can do. With the current political situation he wanted to know what he can do. So he decided to publish short stories, each available for a month, and all the proceeds going to the ACLU. You can read about that more here. This third story in the short stories of 2017 series is the best to date. Lyga’s description of this book is: “A girl receives the most disturbing Valentines present ever. While everyone is talking about that, a famous actress adopts her latest child overseas, to the camera flashes of the paparazzi. And while sanctions in the Middle East cause chaos and controversy, ten teenagers are dumped from their sailboats into frigid water…even as another group of teens plans to rocket a giant mirror into space to protect us from global warming. What connects these stories? How are they related? Maybe they’re not. But maybe, just maybe, they are.”The main premise of this book is that every day is a story. And for this story Lyga pulled a number of headlines from the news and wrote short pieces about them. A second theme is that of what is news, and maybe even what should be news or shouldn’t. And for those of us over a certain age, all of the 12 News events will bring back memories, some stories we will recall completely, and some will just be a blip on the edge of our memory. And the final section in the story has us look back at March 15th in other years, 1916, 1917, 1952 and 1965.

“The world changes too fast and the world changes not fast enough, but the world does change.”

Now I do not live in the US, and am not American, so the fact that proceeds of this book go to the ACLU does not directly impact me. But as I have said in other reviews any chance to read more short stories by Lyga is a win in my books. I have been a fan of Lyga's work since first discovering his writings in the anthology Geektastic back in 2009. And this story is one of the best of his shorter works I have read. Lyga’s pride and appreciation for this story are well founded. And the back story about this piece is inspiring; especially Lyga’s acceptance that sometimes things do not work out even with the best of intentions.This is a great short story and even ten years after it was written it has an intense impact! So go get it while you can and see what impact The Ideas of March has in store for you.